Firefox 3, Beta 4
Posted by Vorenus via Mozilla Developer Center on 11 March 2008 - 14:41 · 11 comments & 6550 views
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
  • Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
  • Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
  • Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, javascript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
  • Performance improvements: changes to our javascript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.


Download: Firefox 3, Beta 4 (in multiple languages)


There are 11 additional comments
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Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by g0dlike on 11 Mar 2008 - 15:28
Truely great software... looking forward to final version, although beta 4 works flawlessly for me.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by Xilo on 11 Mar 2008 - 16:16
Any place that has screenshots of the improved UI?
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by Cryton on 11 Mar 2008 - 16:22
If you want to see the speed increase, try running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on different browsers/versions of Firefox (preferably when you don't have lots of other apps open that may use your CPU time and effect the result).
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #4 Posted by miguel_montes on 11 Mar 2008 - 16:44
Running it now.

Awesome update. Although I don't like the default icons and the new address bar drop down menu.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #5 Posted by Obry on 11 Mar 2008 - 18:36
Runs great, nice to finally see native-looking form fields on Vista. Seems a bit snappier than previous betas. Only problem I have with it is the ugly blue toolbars.
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #6 Posted by +xan K on 12 Mar 2008 - 00:02
wow, can't wait for final version! how is support for add-ons so far? are most of the important ones supported yet?
Quote this comment #6.1 Posted by selflysis on 12 Mar 2008 - 05:43
(xan K said @ #6)
wow, can't wait for final version! how is support for add-ons so far? are most of the important ones supported yet?


For the most part, no. If you read below though, it's more than likely a MAX version collision.
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #7 Posted by Ronnie Sunde on 12 Mar 2008 - 02:40
the only reason I dont use Maxthon is that Firefox have all these awesome add-ons... now, when I want to install add-ons in ff3 they are not compatible...

most of the time I am pretty sure it is just a VERSION number check that makes them not compatible... so is there a way I can hack or cheat or anything to make ff2 add-ons work on ff3?
Quote this comment #7.1 Posted by toadeater on 12 Mar 2008 - 05:29
(Ronnie Sunde said @ #7)
most of the time I am pretty sure it is just a VERSION number check that makes them not compatible... so is there a way I can hack or cheat or anything to make ff2 add-ons work on ff3?


Yes. This is the easiest way:

http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly

I'm more interested in how to migrate my extension settings from 2.0-->3.0. Or do these betas already import them automatically?
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #8 Posted by vraev on 12 Mar 2008 - 12:13
I can't believe how fast this version is. I actually decided that I will stick with the beta this time rather than going back to 2 inspite of loosing the support of my big addon list. This is how the "safari browser video showed fast loading". The pages load in a flash. Great job Mozilla. Now...please just make the UI prettier. Also it would be great if they implement the spotlight style focus system when you do an inline search. Smoothing transitions of the browser like safari would also be great.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #9 Posted by McoreD on 16 Mar 2008 - 12:45
I cannot upgrade to Firefox 3 Beta 4.

None of these work:

Safe mode
Deleting Profiles folder
Deleting all Mozilla folders in %Appdata%

Weird stuff.

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